Re: A reminder about the facts

On Mon, 2 Jun 1997, Kaz Kylheku wrote:

> On Mon, 2 Jun 1997, Richard Stallman wrote:
>
> > The free software community is now in a hole. We need a good free
> > curses package for free operating systems, and the one we thought we
> > had, we do not have. I can see three possible ways we can come up
> > with one:
>
> That is a funny way of looking at it. We clearly ``have'' ncurses. I think
> that its restrictions are an advantage because the authors can exercise
> superior version and quality control. It prevents the ``too many chefs in the
> kitchen'' syndrome.

Since this is possibly at least the 2nd reference to the
multiplicity of *BSDs as a bad thing, I think I will say that, as
a FreeBSD user and subscriber to it's -hackers and -current
lists, having multiple *BSDs is not so terrible. What is
terrible is the occasional catfights that develop between the
groups, but not the (apparent) duplicity of effort. Patches
_are_ shared. And, the benefits are that different groups can
try different approaches/philosophies to problems. It has been
suggested that the competition also encourages development -- for
example, OpenBSD has made many security fixes and, I rather
suspect that this is partly because they needed an (additional)
gimmick to make them more attractive than their parent (NetBSD).

I certainly think similar advantages could be had through
multiple ncurses-based distributions.

(And, in reference to ESR, the reasons that Linux has more users
than *BSD are much more complex and numerous than simply
having multiple groups).

--
Outnumbered?  Maybe.  Outspoken?  Never!
tIM...HOEk